Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Our original series "No Land...Only Slaves!" was created as an index for the slaves named in the county deed records we researched in the Courthouses of the Ark-La-Tex Region. It now looks like our next book will be slave deeds gathered from the Courthouse in Pontotoc County, Mississippi.

This project has experienced a lot of growth from our original premis which was to publish an index of all the slaves named in our research in the Ark-La-Tex courthouses. Our books now include an abstract or complete transcripton of every deed in which a slave or free person of color is mentioned in that county's deed record books, a historical perspective of the county, a TimeTable which compares slave legislation within this tri-state region, census slave schedules and an extra index for all persons & places mentioned within the transcribed records.

Our Ark-La-Tex research eventually expanded further to include other Texas Counties, and NOW it has expanded yet again. We have recently returned from a trip to Tupelo, Mississippi and while we were there we researched the deeds in Pontotoc County in Mississippi. WHEW!

This Mississippi research looks to be the 19th volume in our Black History aid.

During our research we have uncovered the names of thousands of slaves. Identifying these slaves and publishing our findings helps others who have black family history find their ancestors. Among these named slaves there were 123 within our own family. They can be found here . . . <http://slaves.8m.com/crossslaveindex.htm>

We would love to help other's identify their black family ancestry so if you have information to add, feel free to include it here, attached to our blog.

Welcome to our new blog!This is a new process for us "old ladies" so these early efforts may need a lot of editing. I'm sure that, as with all things, we will improve with age . . . (I mean practice).

First we should identify our purpose . . .We are a mother and daughter team of researchers who travel to courthouses, reading old deed books and transcribing them into a database. We then edit the information we have gathered and have the final result printed and published in both a soft-bound & a hard-back library binding. Our original plan was to locate & index all of the slaves named in the deed books of the local area known as the Ark-La-Tex (Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas) which meant about 6-10 counties.

This goal has expanded and our books contain much more than a mere index. Our books now include statistical data from Census records, Abstracted slave records, a historical perspective, slave law tables, charts, graphs & 2 indexes. Our area of research has spread out from the original Ark-La-Tex counties to encompas most of east & central Texas, & even a part of Mississippi (not yet published). So far we have published the records of 23 counties (in 18 volumes) and have already researched and gathered the records of 10 additional counties which are still in the editing process.